A new map of medieval Chester
Following on from the GIS mapping work carried out by the geographers at Queen’s, the project has engaged an in-house cartographer, Gill Alexander, who is using our GIS layers to create a new map of medieval Chester which we hope will prove useful to all kinds of potential users, whether visitors to the city or researchers working on medieval and early-modern Chester.
The finished map will be made available via the project’s web-resource but here is a taster of what is being done.
The aim is also to have separate maps showing Chester Streets, Ecclesiastical Chester, Secular Chester, and Civic Chester, with one map showing the Corpus Christi and Whitsun Plays routes through the city.
August 21st, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Looks interesting! Just tried the online map and it was very slow to load. An overlay on a custom google map would have been much easier?
I will be back when it goes live.
August 24th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Hi, we’re aware of some speed problems and we will be looking at this again soon. In fact the speed of the map has more to do with the speed of your computer than of your internet connection, although both are important.
As to the use (or not) of Google: one of the priorities for the map here was that it preserved the individual layers of GIS data in a way that allowed users to turn them on and off. So, there is not a single overlay, but anywhere up to 26, and this is one of the things contributing to the loading time of the map. Although it is definitely possible to convert GIS shapefiles into the KML format used by Google Maps, it is a fair bit of work to get the map projection correct, and to build a viewing environment that will display them in the way we wanted here. In due course we will be adding the shapefile attribute data to the High Bandwidth map, and this would again be less easy to do if were using Google Maps.
One additional consideration is that the maps you see here are served entirely from our own servers, and so we don’t need to worry about the Google Map API changing in the future – the maps here will remain visible come what may. Finally there is no way to build a low-bandwidth / no JavaScript map with Google Maps (which we provide here as the ‘Low Bandwidth’ map).
Having said all the above, we are looking into building an additional map which will allow overlay of the layers we have created with Google Maps data, primarily to give a better sense of medieval Chester in the context of modern Chester.